Small Change

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Professional reviews
Small Change

Studio album by Tom Waits
Released	October 1976
Recorded	July 15-July 29, 1976
Genre	Rock
Length	49:28
Label	Asylum
Producer(s)	Bones Howe
All Music Guide link Robert Christgau (B-) link
Tom Waits chronology
Nighthawks at the Diner (1975)	Small Change (1976)	Foreign Affairs (1977)

Small Change is also a 1976 film by Truffaut.

Small Change is an album by Tom Waits, released in 1976 on Elektra/Asylum Records.

It was recorded on July 15, 19, 20, 21, and 29, 1976.

It received critical reviews equal to or better than Waits's previous albums, but was at first a surprise commercial success, rising to #89 on the Billboard chart within two weeks of its release. However, Small Change fell off the Billboard Top 200 three weeks later, and Waits was never to better its position until 1999's Mule Variations.

1 Track listing
2 Themes
3 "Tom Traubert's Blues"
4 Musicians
5 Samples

[edit] Track listing

All songs written by Tom Waits.

"Tom Traubert's Blues (Four Sheets To The Wind In Copenhagen)" – 6:39
"Step Right Up" – 5:43
"Jitterbug Boy" – 3:44
"I Wish I Was in New Orleans" – 4:53
"The Piano Has Been Drinking (Not Me)" – 3:40
"Invitation to the Blues" – 5:24
"Pasties and a G-String" – 2:32
"Bad Liver and a Broken Heart" – 4:50
"The One That Got Away" – 4:07
"Small Change" – 5:07
"I Can't Wait to Get Off Work" – 3:17

[edit] Themes

The overall theme of the album is one of desolation, deprivation, and, above all else, drinking. The cast of characters are night-owls and drunks, people lost in a cold, urban world, and all to some extent stuck in a hell of their own making. Populated with hookers, strippers and small-time losers, the album still exudes a rare beauty, in spite or because of Waits' hoarse, rough voice. Set against a backdrop of piano, upright bass, drums and saxophone, you can almost see Waits in some small, smokey, dirty New Jersey venue, sitting on stage and crooning out the verses and choruses.

The album is not a depressing one, though. A song like "I Wish I Was In New Orleans" has a beautiful tonality, where "Pasties and a G-String" has a driving percussion shuffle, with Waits speaking in over the beat, almost like an early version of rap, with some scat elements.

Songs like "The Piano Has Been Drinking" and "Bad Liver And A Broken Heart" are very humorous in their lyrical content and in Waits' drunken diction. The first lines of the latter shows that Waits isn't above writing in his lyrics tongue-in-cheek:

Well I got a bad liver and a broken heart, yea I drunk me a river since you tore me apart, and I don't have a drinking problem, cept when I can't get a drink

[edit] "Tom Traubert's Blues"

"Tom Traubert's Blues" opens the album. The refrain is based (almost word by word) on an old Australian folk hymn, "Waltzing Matilda", but has little in common with this song apart from this. In the Australian version, the term "Waltzing Matilda" means to roam the roads, to go walk-about. In Waits' version it seems to mean the hapless drinking and roaming of the modern small-time nomadic musician.

The origin of the song is somewhat ambiguous. The most plausible version, the sub-title of the track "Four Sheets to the Wind in Copenhagen", seems to be that it is about a time that Waits spent in Copenhagen in 1976 while on a tour. There, he apparently met Danish singer Mathilde Bondo. In a 1998 radio interview, she confirmed that she met Waits and that they spent a night on the town together. This is also confirmed by Peter Sander. This version of the origin of the song is thus supported by the subtitle, the use of the name "Mathilda" (though spelt differently from the potential real-world inspiration) and the fact that Waits has on occasion introduced the song as "a song about throwing up in another country".

In an interview on NPR's World Cafe, aired December 15, 2006, Tom Waits states that Tom Traubert was a 'friend of a friend' that died in prison.

The themes of the song is one of alienation, but also of a stormy, yet perhaps somewhat destructive relationship.